The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) spent most of his life as a private scholar in Naples. His Estetica, which first appeared in 1902, has remained a seminal work not only for aesthetics but also for general linguistics. As the full title indicates, this is not a narrow work dealing with the theory of art and criticism. For Croce intended this to be the first part of his "philosophy of the spirit" and he thus presents a systematic general theory intended to solve all philosophical problems. The work presents an account of the structure of the human mind and shows how art...